Passage 1
Test date: 2011
Learning by Examples
(Read the title and we can quickly identify Learning as
the topic of the passage, and it will discuss a way of
learning – through examples. We now skim down the
first paragraph. The first sentence refers to Pavlov. This
suggests that examples in this context means the
repeated stimuli as used in Pavlov’s experiment.)
A Learning Theory is rooted in the work of Ivan Pavlov,
the famous scientist who discovered and documented
the principles governing how animals (humans
included) learn in the 1900s. Two basic kinds of learning
or conditioning occur, one of which is famously known
as the classical conditioning. Classical conditioning
happens when an animal learns to associate a neutral
stimulus (signal) with a stimulus that has intrinsic
meaning based on how closely in time the two stimuli
are presented. The classic example of classical
conditioning is a dog's ability to associate the sound of
a bell (something that originally has no meaning to the
dog) with the presentation of food (something that has
a lot of meaning to the dog) a few moments later. Dogs
are able to learn the association between bell and food,
and will salivate immediately after hearing the bell once
this connection has been made. Years of learning
research have led to the creation of a highly precise
learning theory that can be used to understand and
predict how and under what circumstances most any
animal will learn, including human beings, and
eventually help people figure out how to change their
behaviours.
B
Role models are a popular notion for guiding child
development, but in recent years very interesting
research has been done on learning by examples in
other animals. If the subject of animal learning is taught
very much in terms of classical or operant conditioning,
it places too much emphasis on how we allow animals
to learn and not enough on how they are equipped to
learn. To teach a course of mine, I have been dipping
profitably into a very interesting and accessible
compilation of papers on social learning in mammals,
including chimps and human children, edited by Heyes
and Galef (1996).
C
The research reported in one paper started with a
school field trip to Israel to a pine forest where many
pine cones were discovered, stripped to the central
core. So the investigation started with no weighty
theoretical intent, but was directed at finding out what
was eating the nutritious pine seeds and how they
managed to get them out of the cones. The culprit
proved to be the versatile and athletic black rat (Rattus
rattus), and the technique was to bite each cone scale
off at its base, in sequence from base to tip following
the spiral growth pattern of the cone.
D
Urban black rats were found to lack the skill and
were unable to learn it even if housed with experienced
cone strippers. However, infants of urban mothers
cross-fostered by stripper mothers acquired the skill,
whereas infants of stripper mothers fostered by an
urban mother could not. Clearly the skill had to be
learned from the mother. Further elegant experiments
showed that naive adults could develop the skill if they
were provided with cones from which the first
complete spiral of scales had been removed; rather like
our new photocopier which you can work out how to
use once someone has shown you how to switch it on.
In the case of rats, the youngsters take cones away
from the mother when she is still feeding on them,
allowing them to acquire the complete stripping skill.
E
A good example of adaptive bearing we might
conclude, but let's see the economies. This was
determined by measuring oxygen uptake of a rat
stripping a cone in a metabolic chamber to calculate
energetic cost and comparing it with the benefit of the
pine seeds measured by calorimeter. The cost proved
to be less than 10% of the energetic value of the cone.
An acceptable profit margin.
F A paper in 1996, Animal Behaviour by Bednekoff and
Balda, provides a different view of the adaptiveness of
social learning. It concerns the seed caching behaviour
of Clark's Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) and the
Mexican Jay (Aphelocoma ultramarina). The former is a
specialist, caching 30,000 or so seeds in scattered
locations that it will recover over the months of winter;
the Mexican Jay will also cache food but is much less
dependent upon this than the Nutcracker. The two
species also differ in their social structure: the
Test date: 2011
Nutcracker being rather solitary while the Jay forages in
social groups.
G The experiment is to discover not just whether a bird
can remember where it hid a seed but also if it can
remember where it saw another bird hide a seed. The
design is slightly comical with a cacher bird wandering
about a room with lots of holes in the floor hiding food
in some of the holes, while watched by an observer bird
perched in a cage. Two days later, cachers and
observers are tested for their discovery rate against an
estimated random performance. In the role of cacher,
not only the Nutcracker but also the less specialised Jay
performed above chance; more surprisingly, however,
jay observers were as successful as jay cachers whereas
nutcracker observers did no better than chance. It
seems that, whereas the Nutcracker is highly adapted
at remembering where it hid its own seeds, the social
living Mexican Jay is more adept at remembering, and
so exploiting, the caches of others.
Questions 1-4: Which paragraph (A-G) contains the
following information? (The instruction says “contain
the ... information”, so these are detail questions: We
just scan the passage, identify the paragraphs that have
the mentioned details. Remember that these are not
main idea questions, so reading just the topic sentence
of each paragraph may not help)
1. A comparison between rats' learning and human
learning (Para D)
2. A reference to the earliest study in animal learning
(Para A)
3. The discovery of who stripped the pine cone (para
C)
4. A description of a cost-effectiveness experiment
(para E)
was eating the nutritious pine seeds and how they
managed to get them out of the cones False)
6. The pine cones were stripped from bottom to top
by black rats. T
7. It can be learned from other relevant experiences
to use a photocopier. T
8. Stripping the pine cones is an instinct of the black
rats. F
Questions 9-13: Complete the summary below using
words from the box. (Remember that a summary
question normally from one or two paragraphs only.
We can glance at the summary and quickly find the
word Nutcracker, Jay. Now scan the passage for these
words. Once we have located them in paragraph F, we
can read more slowly to decide on the words that fill
the blanks.)
While the Nutcracker is more able to cache seeds, the
Jay relies 9............................ (less). on caching food
and is thus less specialised in this ability, but more
10.............................. (social) To study their behaviour
of caching and finding their caches, an experiment was
designed and carried out to test these two birds for
their ability to remember where they hid the seeds. In
the experiment, the cacher bird hid seeds in the ground
while the other 11 .............................. (watched). As a
result, the Nutcracker and the Mexican Jay showed
different performance in the role of 12...........................
(observer) at finding the seeds - the observing 13
............................ (nutcracker) didn't do as well as its
counterpart.
less
social
more
cacher
solitary
observer
remembered
Nutcracker
watched
Jay
Questions 5-8: True/False/Not Given
5. The field trip to Israel was to investigate how black
rats learn to strip pine cones. F (Remember this
technique: The statement has a name – Israel – so
we quickly scan the passage and find the field trip
to Israel. Once we have located it in paragraph C,
we read carefully to decide whether the statement
is true, false or not given. The passage says “the
investigation ... was directed at finding out what
Passage 2
A New Ice Age
William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not
an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's famous painting "George
Washington Crossing the Delaware", which depicts a
boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way
Test date: 2011
to attack English and Hessian troops the day after
Christmas in 1776. "Most people think these other guys
in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing
the ice away," says Curry, tapping his finger on a
reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead
oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. "I
grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30
minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing
just doesn't happen anymore."
The reason for such huge effects is simple. A quick
climate change wreaks far more disruption than a slow
one. People, animals, plants, and the economies that
depend on them are like rivers; says the report: "For
example, high water in a river will pose few problems
until the water runs over the bank, after which levees
can be breached and massive flooding can occur. Many
biological processes undergo shifts at particular
thresholds of temperature and precipitation."
But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to
those immortalised by the 16th-century Flemish painter
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe.
His works, including the 1565 masterpiece "Hunters in
the Snow", make the now-temperate European
landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings
were commonplace during a period dating roughly from
1300 to 1850 because much of North America and
Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now
there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A
growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe
for another prolonged cooldown, or small ice age.
While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the
one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with
glaciers about 12,000 years ago, the next cooling trend
could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit
over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the
Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
Political changes since the last ice age could make
survival far more difficult for the world's poor. During
previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up
and moved south, but that option doesn't work in the
modern, tense world of closed borders. "To the extent
that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and
extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the
land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the
major safety nets for distressed people," says the
report.
"It could happen in 10 years,” says Terrence Joyce, who
chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography
Department. "Once it does, it can take hundreds of
years to reverse." And he is alarmed that Americans
have yet to take the threat seriously.
A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than
simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on.
Both economically and ecologically, such quick,
persistent
chilling
could
have
devastating
consequences. A 2002 report titled "Abrupt Climate
Change: Inevitable Surprises", produced by the National
Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural
losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also
predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and
incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests,
increased housing expenses, dwindling fresh water,
lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
But first things first. Isn't the earth actually warming?
Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft
light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how
such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of
the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the
appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic
of huge rivers of fresh water - the equivalent of a 10foot-thick layer - mixed into the salty sea. No one is
certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a
prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a build-up
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar
energy.
The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science
circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who
sounded an alarm at a February conference in
Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and
temperature in the Labrador Sea - a body of water
between northeastern Canada and Greenland that
adjoins the Atlantic -"arguably the largest full-depth
changes observed in the modern instrumental
oceanographic record".
The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the
northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally,
the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the
tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United
Test date: 2011
States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream
surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North
Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to
Europe. That's why many scientists believe winter
temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36
degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North
America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for
example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as
balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also
warms Americans and Canadians. "It's a real mistake to
think of this solely as a European phenomenon," says
Joyce.
Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler
water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic
by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call
thermohaline circulation. This massive column of
cascading cold is the main engine powering a deepwater current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that
snakes through all the world's oceans. But as the North
Atlantic fills with fresh water, it grows less dense,
making the waters carried northward by the Gulf
Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively
fresh water sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal
blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That
in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer
southward. At some point, the whole system could
simply shut down, and do so quickly. "There is
increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a
transition point, from which we can jump to a new
state."
d. Europe will look more like Lapland.
16. Why is it difficult for the poor to survive the next
ice age?
a. People don't live in tribes anymore.
b. Politics are changing too fast today.
c. Abrupt climate change causes people to live off
their land.
d. Migration has become impossible because of
closed borders.
17. Why is continental Europe much warmer than
North America in winter?
a. Wind blows most of the heat of tropical
currents to Europe.
b. Europe and North America are at different
latitudes.
c. The Gulf Stream has stopped yielding heat to
the air.
d. The Gulf Stream moves north along the east
coast of North America.
Questions 18-22: Match each statement with the
correct person A-D.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
18. Most Americans are not prepared for the next ice
age.
19. The result of abrupt climate change is catastrophic.
20. The world is not as cold as it used to be.
21. Global warming is closely connected to the ice age.
22. Alerted people to the change of ocean water in a
conference
Questions 14-17: Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
14. The writer uses paintings in the first paragraph to
illustrate
a. possible future climate change.
b. climate change of the last two centuries.
c. the river doesn't freeze in winter anymore.
d. how George Washington led his troops across
the river.
15. Which of the following do scientists believe to be
possible?
a. The temperature may drop over much of the
Northern Hemisphere.
b. It will be colder than 12,000 years ago.
c. The entire Northern Hemisphere will be
covered in ice.
A.
B.
C.
D.
List of People
William Curry
Terrence Joyce
Bob Dickson
National Academy of Sciences
Questions 23-26: Complete the flow chart below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the
passage for each answer.
Tropical warm water
Less 23
Water becomes 24 and
sinks
Thermohaline
circulation
Deep ocean
called 25
current
Less dense, hard to sink
Increase in 26
Test date: 2011
Stays on top
Gulf Stream slows or
shuts down
Passage 3
The Fruit Book
It's not every scientist who writes books for people
who can't read. And how many scientists want
their books to look as dog-eared as possible? But
Patricia Shanley, an ethnobotanist, wanted to give
something back. After the poorest people of the
Amazon allowed her to study their land and its
ecology, she turned her research findings into a
picture book that tells the local people how to get a
good return on their trees without succumbing to
the lure of a quick buck from a logging company. It
has proved a big success.
A
The book is called Fruit Trees and Useful Plants in the
Lives of Amazonians, but is better known simply as the
"fruit book". The second edition was produced at the
request of politicians in western Amazonia. Its blend of
hard science and local knowledge on the use and trade
of 35 native forest species has been so well received
(and well used) that no less a dignitary than Brazil's
environment minister, Marina Silva, has written the
foreword. "There is nothing else like the Shanley book,'
says Adalberto Verrisimo, director of the Institute of
People and the Environment of the Amazon. "It gives
science back to the poor, to the people who really need
it."
B Shanley's work on the book began a decade ago, with
a plea for help from the Rural Workers' Union of
Paragominas, a Brazilian town whose prosperity is
based on exploitation of timber. The union realised that
logging companies would soon be knocking on the
doors of the caboclos, peasant farmers living on the Rio
Capim, an Amazon tributary in the Brazilian state of
Para. Isolated and illiterate, the caboclos would have
little concept of the true value of their trees;
communities downstream had already sold off large
blocks of forest for a pittance. "What they wanted to
know was how valuable the forests were," recalls
Shanley, then a researcher in the area for the
Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Research Centre.
C The Rural Workers' Union wanted to know whether
harvesting wild fruits would make economic sense in
the Rio Capim. "There was a lot of interest in trading
non-timber forest products (NTFPs)," Shanley says. At
the time, environmental groups and green-minded
businesses were promoting the idea. This was the view
presented in a seminal paper, Valuation of an
Amazonian Rainforest, published in Nature in 1989. The
researchers had calculated that revenues from the sale
of fruits could far exceed those from a one-off sale of
trees to loggers. "The union was keen to discover
whether it made more sense conserving the forest for
subsistence use and the possible sale of fruit, game and
medicinal plants, than selling trees for timber," says
Shanley. Whether it would work for the caboclos was
far from clear.
D Although Shanley had been invited to work in the Rio
Capim, some caboclos were suspicious. "When Patricia
asked if she could study my forest," says Joao Fernando
Moreira Brito, "my neighbours said she was a foreigner
who'd come to rob me of my trees." In the end,
Moreira Brito, or Mangueira as he is known, welcomed
Shanley and worked on her study. His land, an hour's
walk from the Rio Capim, is almost entirely covered
with primary forest. A study of this and other tracts of
forest selected by the communities enabled Shanley to
identify three trees, found throughout the Amazon,
whose fruit was much favoured by the caboclos: bacuri
(Platonia insignis), uxi (Endop-leura uchi) and piquia
(Cayocas villosum). The caboclos used their fruits,
extracted oils, and knew what sort of wildlife they
attracted. But, in the face of aggressive tactics from the
logging companies, they had no measure of the trees'
financial worth. The only way to find out, Shanley
decided, was to start from scratch with a scientific
study. "From a scientific point of view, hardly anything
was known about these trees," she says. But six years of
Test date: 2011
field research yielded a mass of data on their flowering
and fruiting behaviour. During 1993 and 1994, 30
families weighed everything they used from the forest game, fruit, fibre, medicinal plants - and documented
its source.
E After three logging sales and a major fire in 1997, the
researchers were also able to study the ecosystem's
reaction to logging and disturbance. They carried out a
similar, though less exhaustive, study in 1999, this time
with 15 families. The changes were striking. Average
annual household consumption of forest fruit had fallen
from 89 to 28 kilogrammes between 1993 and 1999.
"What we found," says Shanley, "was that fruit
collection could coexist with a certain amount of
logging, but after the forest fire it dropped
dramatically." Over the same period, fibre use also
dropped from around 20 to 4 kilogrammes. The fire and
logging also changed the nature of the caboclo diet. In
1993 most households ate game two or three times a
month. By 1999 some were fortunate if they ate game
more than two or three times a year.
F
The loss of certain species of tree was especially
significant. Shanley's team persuaded local hunters to
weigh their catch, noting the trees under which the
animals were caught. Over the year, they trapped five
species of game averaging 232 kilogrammes under
piquia trees. Under copaiba, they caught just two
species averaging 63 kilogrammes; and under uxi, four
species weighing 38 kilogrammes. At last, the team was
getting a handle on which trees were worth keeping,
and which could reasonably be sold. "This showed that
selling piquia trees to loggers for a few dollars made
little sense," explains Shanley, "Their local value lies in
providing a prized fruit, as well as flowers which attract
more game than any other species."
G As a result of these studies, Shanley had to tell the
Rural Workers' Union of Paragominas that the Nature
thesis could not be applied wholesale to their
community - harvesting NTFPs would not always yield
more than timber sales. Fruiting patterns of trees such
as uxi were unpredictable, for example. In 1994, one
household collected 3,654 uxi fruits; the following year,
none at all.
H
This is not to say that wild fruit trees were
unimportant. On the contrary, argues Shanley, they are
critical for subsistence, something that is often ignored
in much of the current research on NTFPs, which tends
to focus on their commercial potential. Geography was
another factor preventing the Rio Capim caboclos from
establishing a serious trade in wild fruit: villagers in
remote areas could not compete with communities
collecting NTFPs close to urban markets, although they
could sell them to passing river boats.
I
But Shanley and her colleagues decided to do more
than just report their results to the union. Together
with two of her research colleagues, Shanley wrote the
fruit book. This, the Bible and a publication on
medicinal plants co-authored by Shanley and designed
for people with minimal literacy skills are about the
only books you will see along this stretch of the Rio
Capim. The first print ran to only 3,000 copies, but the
fruit book has been remarkably influential, and is used
by colleges, peasant unions, industries and the caboclos
themselves. Its success is largely due to the fact that
people with poor literacy skills can understand much of
the information it contains about the non-timber forest
products, thanks to its illustrations, anecdotes, stories
and songs. "The book doesn't tell people what to do,"
says Shanley, "but it does provide them with choices."
The caboclos who have used the book now have a
much better understanding of which trees to sell to the
loggers, and which to protect.
Questions 27-32: Which paragraph contains the
following information?
27. A description of Shanley's initial data collection
28. Why a government official also contributes to the
book
29. Reasons why the community asked Shanley to
conduct the research
30. Reference to the starting point of her research
31. Two factors that alter food consumption patterns
32. Why the book is successful
Questions 33-40: Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the
passage for each answer.
Forest fire has caused local villagers to consume less:
33.......................................
Test date: 2011
34.......................................
Game
There is the least amount of game hunted under
35....................................... , and its fruit yield is also
36....................................... Thus, it is more reasonable
to keep 37.......................................
All the trees can also be used for
38....................................... besides selling them to
loggers. But this is often ignored, because most
researches usually focus on the 39 of the trees.
The purpose of the book: To give information about
40.......................................
Test date: 2011
KEY
1. D
14. B
27. D
2. A
15. A
28. A
3. C
16. D
29. C
4. E
17. A
30. B
5. False
18. B
31. E
6. True
19. D
32. I
7. True
20. A
33. Fruit
8. False
21. B
34. Fibre
9. Less
22. C
35. Uxi
10.Social
23. Heat
36. Unpredictable
11.Watched
24. Denser
37. Piquia
12.Observer
25. Great Ocean
38. Subsistence
13.Nutcracker
Conveyor
26. Fresh water
39. Commercial potential
40. NTFRs/non-timber forest
product